This paper takes up the topic explored by Wolfgang G. Müller in this volume and discusses the various forms in which Carneades’ thought experiment was conceptualized and employed in philosophy, science, and law, as well as literature and film of the 20th and 21st centuries. Of course, it will not be possible to address all instances – in particular in popular culture, where the dilemma raised by Carneades resurfaces in ever new metaphorizations – and I will have to focus on some theoretical aspects, a few practical cases, and a variety of patterns and motifs that emerge in literary works or films. In some variants, the elements of the thought experiment have changed to a certain degree, but the underlying dilemma is still clearly recognizable. Of particular importance in recent discussions is the so-called trolley problem and research into cognitive responses to the dilemma. A second approach can be found in evolutionary theory and the discussion of altruism and self-sacrifice, both of which do not seem to be compatible with the struggle for survival as described in Darwinism. In the realm of law, the case of Mary and Jodie Attard forced a court decision on whether a human being should be killed in order to save the life of the conjoined sibling: similarly, but on a different scale, controversial discussions following the aftermath of 9/11 have involved the question as to whether a plane with possibly hundreds of passengers should be shot down to prevent an even larger catastrophe. Each of these theoretical concepts and their very real considerations have had their impact on literature and cinema, and this paper offers a survey of the most important narrative patterns and examples.

This essay attempts to establish an ethics of literature, which, as distinct from earlier approaches, is transgenerically oriented in that it does not focus on narrative alone but on the three main literary genres of narrative, dramatic, and lyric art. It follows Wittgenstein’s much-quoted dictum that aesthetics and ethics are one. Its basic assumption is that ethics emerges in literature under the condition of aesthetic form. The much-discussed problem of the relation between philosophy and literature is found in the concept of the proposition, which, in Aristotle, who uses the term apophansis, means a statement, assertion, or predication. In philosophy, the proposition is, as Gottfried Gabriel emphasizes in his monograph on cognition (2015), an essential element within deductive processes of argumentation, contributing to proving a theoretical position or working out a theoretical position. In literature, propositions usually do not occur in extended argumentative contexts. They make a statement that may have a significant philosophical and specifically ethical impact and that may relate to the entire works concerned. Hence, the concept of propositionality makes it possible to relate and simultaneously differentiate the two great achievements of the human mind: philosophy and literature. In the essay’s analytic part attention is given to specific ethical dilemmas in Homer’s “Iliad” and Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”, the representation of evil in Shakespeare’s tragedies, narrative strategies for presenting ethical situations and events in nineteenth-century novels (Austen, Dickens, Trollope, Twain, Tolstoy), and the occurrence of ethical elements in lyric poetry. As far as the lyric genre is concerned, we take note of the paradoxical fact that even in the object poetry of Rilke and the imagists (Williams), an ethical aspect emerges. A common result of textual analysis is the recognition of propositional elements in all texts investigated.

It is Aristotle to whom we owe the first philosophical theory of poetic art fully extant from antiquity. He recognized the origin of art and poetry in man’s capacity for theory and his pleasure in it, for he considered imitation (mímēsis) as the beginning and basis of cognition. He understood imitation not as a mere act of copying but as the realization and re-implementation of a single person’s general disposition to act, which is to say his or her disposition to turn towards the world aiming to seek pleasure or to avoid pain. The poet’s task is to represent such a way of acting, real or fictitious, in some medium in a certain way. An orderly representation of this kind starts from an (again, real or fictitious) person’s decision to prefer or avoid something. It closely follows this agent’s ‘quality’ (poiótēs), which is to say his or her character. Thereby, the poet can achieve a congruence of all parts of the entire action with one another and with the whole. This is what, in Aristotle’s view, is the poet’s task. At the time of the reception of Aristotle’s “Poetics” around 1500 AD, the understanding of poetry was widely shaped by Horace and Cicero and hence had a strongly rhetorical character. For Horace, it is true, the poet ought to be an imitator, as well, even though an ‘erudite’ imitator. In Horace’s view, however, his knowledge regards the general manners of man. Therefore, the poet, gifted as such with ‘prophetic eye’ and ‘wisdom,’ has the ability to express this knowledge in vivid and concrete terms (communia proprie dicere). This knowledge, which men, parents, brothers, politicians, judges, military commanders, etc. use to act was considered to be learnable according to the rules of rhetoric, although it is only by the poet’s individual talent that it can become art. It was believed that what Aristotle had called the ‘probable’ could be equated with this skill based on acquired experience and genius. As a consequence of this reinterpretation, Aristotelian probability, which makes a certain man talk and act in a certain way in accordance with his character, changed into the probability of the course of the world. The order of the action was turned into the order of things as the object of imitation. The development of art and literature as well as of the aesthetic theories of the modern age was essentially influenced by the concept of an order of things and thus impedes access to the rationality of poetry envisioned by Aristotle.

Wenn auch viel über die Beziehung zwischen Literatur und Philosophie nachgedacht worden ist, sind entscheidende Fragen noch offengeblieben, z.B. die Frage des Verhältnisses zwischen der prinzipiell ästhetischen Verfasstheit literarischer Texte und dem ebenfalls prinzipiell rational-logischen Argumentationsmodus philosophischer Texte und die Frage der Bedingungsfaktoren der seit der Antike fruchtbaren Interdependenz von Philosophie und Literatur, die als Signum einer Kultur gelten kann, in der Dichten und Denken koexistieren und vielfach auch konvergieren. Der Band widmet sich Erscheinungsformen und Spielarten der Interaktion von Philosophie und Literatur, so dem Mimesis-Konzept von der antiken Philosophie bis zur modernen Literaturtheorie, dem Denken der Vorsokratiker, das in der Moderne wieder aufgegriffen wurde, der antiken Gattung des Gedankenexperiments und seiner Bedeutung bis zur Gegenwart. Platons Ring des Gyges wird als antiker Ursprung der Vorstellung des unsichtbaren Menschen herausgestellt. Ein Beitrag untersucht die ethische Dimension der Literatur, ein weiterer Freges Deutung der Sprache der Poesie. Fallstudien beschäftigen sich mit Ciceros intrikater Verwendung des Dialogs, Hölderlins Umsetzung der Philosophie in Literatur, Hegels Vergeistigung der Kunst, Schopenhauers Literarisierung der Philosophie, Wallace Stevens’ lyrischem Philosophieren, der Assimilation von Derridas Denken bei Francis Ponge, der Bedeutung moderner wissenschaftlicher Theorien bei Samuel Beckett und anderen postmodernen Romanciers und mit der Anverwandlung asiatischer Philosophie im Werk des amerikanischen Lyrikers Gary Snyder.

Despite its predominantly maritime subjects, the work of the German-speaking Luxembourgish poet Jean Krier presents itself from its debut (“Breton Islands,” 1994) as a deconstruction of classical nature poetry. Jean Krier’s poems thus stand in a tradition that goes back to Schiller and extends to the aesthetic theory of Theodor W. Adorno in ratifying the state of man’s separation from nature. Krier’s aesthetic procedure is based on the deconstruction of linguistic material that is subjected to states of play (mots-valises, homophonies, polyphonies, word lists, etc.). His poetry thus becomes a modern form of literary criticism in which disparate flotsam and junk-language reflect each other.

Loreley, a natural-born femme fatale from German mythology, has inspired poets since Romanticism. From a contemporary perspective, however, this character has simply lost her magical qualities and, at the same time, been transformed into a gatekeeper and an advocate for nature under threat in the Anthropocene. This article concerns the poetics surrounding Loreley – including the use of irony, role report, metamorphosis, and inspiration – in Franz Josef Czernin’s sonnet, „nach loreley“, Ulla Hahn’s „Ars poetica“ and „Meine Loreley“, Uwe Kolbe’s „Halle-Lureley“, and Peter Rühmkorf’s „Hochseil“. Loreley’s broken modernity does not only re veal her own abused nature. She is also promoted to a postmodern ‚Zudichterin‘ (Ernst Robert Curtius), reading the book of nature through semiotics rather than in terms of originality and creation.

This article investigates the relation between nature, ethics, and poetics in the work of Paul Celan, using „Engführung“ [“Stretto”] as a starting point. The readings from Celan’s library testify to his careful rethinking of what “reality” means. Applying the terminology and research of geology, physics, and, in particular, quantum mechanics, opens up an interpretative horizon for Celan’s poetry that can be configured according to the laws of entanglement as well as the form of a multidimensional ‚Raumgitter‘. The human and ethical elements of intentionality and being-in-the-world are not obliterated but rather subordinated to the natural itself. Celan goes beyond the idea of a subject-observer of the world-as-object and offers us a perspective in which language, as well as humanity and intentionality (poetic and otherwise), is merely one cosmic manifestation – part of nature itself. Language, like nature, shows different and changing states of being. It can be metamorphic but also sedimentary; conglomerate but also fluid like the elements present in nature. It is not a metaphorical analogy but a changing material state. It is non-local, dynamic, and provisional, like the relationality of quantum aggregations. Writing ‚nach der Natur‘ is, for Celan, who makes the knowledge and vocabulary of the natural sciences his own, to recover this metamorphic, provisional dimension of language – inside and outside time, probabilistic, invisible at a macroscopic level. By writing in and as nature in this way, poetry resists the destruction of what “happened” [geschehen] at the camps in the most devastating way.

Am 22. und 23. Oktober 2019 fand an der Universität Bergamo ein “Convegno internazionale” über „Europäische Naturlyrik nach 1945“ mit Forscher:innen aus Italien und Deutschland statt. Bei freundlichem Herbstwetter wurden „Gespräche über Bäume“ unternommen, die von Brechts bekanntem Vers über Celans Naturlyrik bis zur Legitimation eines solchen „Gesprächs“ reichten. Der Horizont der Diskussion wurde komparatistisch ausgezogen und erstreckte sich auf die französische, die luxemburgische, die englische, die italienische und die deutsche Naturdichtung. Angesichts der Ideenfülle der Beiträge entschieden sich die Initiator:innen der Tagung dazu, die Beiträge auf zwei Bände zu verteilen: auf einen Themenband über Bäume in der zeitgenössischen Naturlyrik1 und den vorliegenden Band, in den die über das Baum-Motiv hinauswachsenden Beiträge der Tagung Eingang gefunden haben. Die Konferenz sowie die beiden daraus hervorgegangenen Bände sind ein Ergebnis der Zusammenarbeit von Amelia Valtolina (Bergamo) und Michael Braun (Berlin) mit der an der Universität Trier angesiedelten DFG-Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe 2603 „Russischsprachige Lyrik in Transition. Poetische Formen des Umgangs mit Grenzen der Gattung, Sprache, Kultur und Gesellschaft zwischen Europa, Asien und Amerika“. Die Vorträge dieser Konferenz nahmen das Wechselspiel von Geschichte und Natur im poetischen Wort, die Dialektik von Romantisierung und Dämonisierung der Natur sowie die Doppelfunktion von Modernekritik und Zivilisationsmüdigkeit im Naturgedicht in den Blick. Es ging um die Fort- oder Neuschreibung von Traditionen und Genres sowie um die Poetik und Ästhetik des Naturgedichts im kulturellen und historischen Wandel. Entsprechend rückt der Titel des vorliegenden Bandes das immer wieder in der Diskussion unter den Vortra genden hervorgehobene Transitorische des Naturbegriffes ins Zentrum.

Nicolaus Cusanus presents a subtle theory of alterity. We will show why Cusanus does not consistently assign humans a position superior to other living beings, even when strong anthropocentric arguments seem to be present. Kazuhiko Yamaki (2017: 280), e.g., has recently pointed out that the attribution of a privileged position to humans in the world already fails logically, because the complicatio-explicatio scheme applies to all creatures. I would like to follow up on Yamaki’s argument that Cusanus at this point is rather concerned with describing a specific relationship between God and the creatures or the world. If this argument is extended to the question of humans and animals in Cusanus as a whole, the way in which these relations are to be figured becomes the focus of consideration. Just as Cusanus, in cosmology and anthropology, examines the perspectivity of knowledge and the decentralization of the Earth (as a noble star among other stars) without falling into pure perspectivism or decentralism, so traits of this reflective and (figuratively) ‘living’ thinking must also apply to the description of the relationship of living beings to one another or in relation to their Creator.

This article argues that Nicholas of Cusa, in contrast to the scholastic tradition and in consensus with the humanists of his time, develops a high esteem for Artes Me chanicae, placing it on an equal level with Artes Liberales. A close reading of the relevant passages in Cusa’s work reveals that although his early philosophical writings present the old scholastic position, in the Idiota-writings (1450), he shifts his stance toward the Artes Mechanicae and significantly elevates it. Influenced by his encounter with the Italian humanists in Rome, he maintains this approach throughout his late works and late sermons. This positive reweighting of Artes Mechanicae is consistent with Cusanus’ view of the immanence of God and leads him to revaluate his world view.

The concept of art is a lens through which one can explore the thought of Nicho las of Cusa. He uses this notion throughout his work in order to address the pro ductive dynamism of the divine mind as well as the human mind. With a focus on the human arts as likenesses of the divine art, this paper studies the relationship between the art of the word and the illiterate manual arts. Firstly, we examine the ars coniecturalis as a human art form that Cusanus presents for the first time in extenso in “De coniecturis”. Secondly, we address the power of the art of the word through the production of its most precious form, the spoken word. Thirdly, and finally, we inquire into the power of the manual arts through the example of the idiota’s making of wooden spoons in the “De mente” in order to show the relationship between this art and the art of the word.

Alongside the relationship between philosophy and painting, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a speculative interest emerged in the concept of three-dimensional vision in Cusa, Jan van Eyck, Marsilio Ficino, and Giorgione da Castelfranco. The visio circularis theme becomes a central metaphor for a new way of thinking and seeing the world, which culminates in Leonardo da Vinci’s studies on perspective. In this context, the mirror forms a dominant theme in the development of the studies and applications of perspective, which becomes increasingly sensitive to sculptural relief.

“Art and Technology in Nicholas of Cusa” discusses a basic assumption of the Central European ‘Weltanschauung’ since the early modern period. The two terms and their relationship to each other represent formative parameters that extend up to the present, in the so-called Anthropocene. An exemplary relevance of these terms can be found in Nicholas of Cusa. It comes to light in the development of art and technique between Cusanus and Leonardo da Vinci (G. Cuzzo). In Cusa’s philosophy, conjectural thinking forms the systematic core of this approach (C. D'Amico and J. González Rios). This thinking points in two directions, in that art and thought in Cusanus’ reception of Neoplatonism and its independent appropriation lead to scientia aenigmatica , which at the same time manifests itself in technical images. (W.C. Schneider). Thereby, the liberal and the mechanical arts experience the same high esteem (K. Yamaki). For Nicholas, technology proves to be a form of expression of the “viva imago Dei” and its creative art; thus, Cusa characterizes two different forms of consciousness: the reflexive self-consciousness of science and technology as well as the creative consciousness of spiritual self-development (H. Schwaetzer). Cusa applied this concept also to humans and animals, and hence to nature in general (K. Zeyer).  The present volume not only contributes to research on Cusanus but also provides a specimen for comparative studies of different forms of consciousness.

This essay applies a Cultural Studies-approach to the multi-facetted relationship between poetry and advertisement as it emerged in the first half of the 20th century in the United States and as it became visible on billboards by the roadside. Somewhat paradoxically, public poetry in advertising appeared all across the United States (predominantly along highways in rural areas) around the time that much of modernist American poetry was being declared a highly elitist and urban centric affair in the orbit of new criticism-scholarship at universities. My first case study addresses the iconic Burma-Shave Billboard Poetry Campaign (1929-1963) and its long-lasting influence on American (popular) culture – in literature, music, visual art. Prior to this campaign as well as on the heels of it, billboards and billboard poetry were taken up to a minor extent in poetry circles and literary criticism (where they continued to be mostly viewed with disdain) and to a larger extent by conceptual artists who used billboard aesthetics, slogans, and short (poetic) texts in installations mimicking and critiquing consumer culture. One of the most aesthetically innovative recent ‘returns’ of billboard poetry, however, is the one employed intra-diegetically in the Hollywood film “Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri” (2017), my second case study. Here, the writing on the billboard-walls make those aspects explicit that have been submerged in the earlier rhymes by the roadside: While the playful, optimistic lines of advertisement imply, time and again, a happy white middle-class American family with a sober and well-shaved patriarch behind the wheel and thus gloss over the disavowed underside of mobility, the film makes the latent manifest and points to systemic / structural violence, such as a pervasive American rape ‘culture’ which is linked to the car and the mobility it offers. The film uses the billboard and its inscription as foil and as catalyst to address and to protest this and other forms of violence and thus presents an activist intervention in order to ask for more than merely poetic justice.

Internet poetry clips are a multimedial hybrid form that comingles features of different literary genres, such as lyric, epic, and drama; different modal categories, such as spoken language, writing, gestures, and facial expressions; and medial modes, such as text, performance, video clip, and documentary. This paper deals with the central features of three selected internet poetry clips: “A Brown Girl’s Guide to Gender” by Aranya Johar, “Water” by Koleka Putuma, and „Ohne mich“ by Sandra Da Vina. The focus is on the media-specific forms of personal union between author and performer in each of these works.

In the article, I will discuss the relationship between ‘book poetry’ and ‘digital poetry.’ I examine the differences, as well as the similarities, between poetry as presented in these two media. Research on the transition from book poetry to digital poetry has mainly focussed on the significant changes in genre and work concepts as well as in the author and reader roles. However, several trends within the tradition of poetry have intensified and have further developed since the emergence of the digital media. The focus in this paper will thus be on four key features, which were founded in book poetry as far back as early Modernism and the avant-garde movements, but, to a great extent, those features have unfolded in digital poetry. The four features are the multimodality, the montage form, the network structure, and the serial form. The artistic opportunities offered by digital poetry are not only due to technological opportunities in the new media. Such opportunities are just as much due to the innovations in multimodality, montages, network structures, and seriality realized by avant-garde and symbolist poets like Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Schwitters, Eliot, and Pound in early modernism. My article concludes with an example of how the four features form the basis for a work of digital poetry, namely Johannes Heldén’s “The Primary Directive” (2008).

This paper is focused on a relatively new phenomenon: joint performances by poets and avant-garde (primarily electronic) musicians in contemporary Russia. In part, these performances are reminiscent of performances by American and Western European poets with jazz ensembles in the 1960s and 1970s. At that time in the Soviet Union, this practice was almost unheard of: when intermedial experiments did take place, poets – particularly the so-called “official” poets – turned not to music but to theatre. The most important elements of these performances were their emphases on virtuosic improvisation, the theatrical immediacy of what was taking place, and creating a community around the performer. In contrast, contemporary collaborations between poets and musicians largely demonstrate the non-self-sufficiency of their respective media and, in doing so, deconstruct the. very premise of the poetic (lyric) subject. My contention is that intermediality as such – in this case, the interaction between music and poetry – could thus be the most important tool available for creating a “poetry without a subject.” Moreover, in practice, it has acquired a salient social and political meaning in modern Russia: depicting culture as a space of individualized dialogues and polylogues.

Starting from the imperative to not just read, but to speak lyric poems out loud, this paper considers ways in which poems change depending on who utters them. Beyond the familiar distinction between the poem’s author and the lyrical ‘I’ – the voice in which the poet chooses to utter the poem – any performer who speaks a poem also impersonates the text. Reading is the first act of interpretation; others follow. Sound is an indispensable constitutive aspect of the lyric poem, too often neglected. Each reading of a poem can turn into a momentary ec-stasis.

A new genre has emerged in contemporary literature: the ‘novel in poems.’ This genre hybridizes the novel and poetry in order to construct characters and a plot through relatively autonomous poems in series. The ‘novel in poems’ appears in different subtypes, which can be categorized according to the following criteria: (1) the presence of one speaker versus several speakers, (2) the presence of a speaker as lyric protagonist and/or narrator, and (3) the presence of a blend of distinct modes of lyric, narrative, and dramatic representation in various forms of combination. Specific characteristics of the ‘novel in poems’ are: 1) variation of constituent poetic forms with different degrees of semantic autonomy and brevity; 2) hyper-structuring through symmetries, holism, and equivalences; 3) a tendency to differentiate mediating instances within the text; 4) the reduction or elimination of the narrator or of narrative principles and the use of an omnipresent textual subject; 5) the presence of metapoetic reflections on topics such as poetry and creativity; 6) an emphasis on voice, person, and subjectivity; 7) episodic plot construction through montage techniques and a tendency toward chronological order; 8) the predominance of present speech and action; 9) contradictions between the speaker as subject and addresser, via the lyric fiction of performativity, and the function of narration; 10) a necessity imposed upon the reader to reconstruct the plot and characters. This essay establishes three subtypes within the proposed genre: a lyric ‘novel in poems’ with one speaker (Irina Ermakova), a polyphonically narrative ‘novel in poems’ that combines third-person narration with several alterior speakers (Lana Hechtman Ayers), and, finally, a dramatic ‘novel in poems’ with shifting primary speakers (Glyn Maxwell).

The work of Japanese-German writer Yoko Tawada (Tawada Yōko) stands out as an example of ‘in-between’ writing. Instead of simply ‘translating’ Japanese into German and vice versa, Tawada blends both languages and cultures, often self-reflexively. As a result, poetic in-between spaces emerge, in which creative work, cultural translation, and social criticism can take place. The texts also construct in-between spaces on a formal level. For instance, the verse novels “Kasa no shitai to watashi no tsuma” (『傘の死体とわたしの妻』, 2006) and “Ein Balkonplatz für flüchtige Abende” (2016) feature both narrative progression and poetic devices (vivid imagery, association, and wordplay), defying categorization either as volumes of poetry or as novels. In addition, the in-between space of genres becomes visible in Tawada’s self-translations, which often amount to rewritings and lead to a change in genre – travel essay to novella, novel to drama, or poem to prose text. An example of this genre-transcending bilingualism as entryway to an in-between space are the texts „Die Orangerie“ (1997) and “Orenji-en nite” (「オレンジ園にて」, 1997/1998), which initially appear as a poem and its (apparently) prose translation. However, a number of textual peculiarities of both pieces point to the mutual influences between versions. Thus, I read all four examples as hybrid forms of poetry, which perform the mixing of genres, languages, and cultures that occurs in today’s world. In their cultural hybridity especially, the poems point to underlying social issues of homo- and xenophobia.

More than any other literary form, contemporary poetry is in transition: interspersed with narrative and dramatic genres, combining prose and verse, and even incorporating other media, such as visual arts, music, film, and digital technology. It shifts the borders between public and private spheres, aesthetic and discursive approaches, and producer and recipient. On the basis of case studies, this issue addresses the challenges of poetry in transition and stimulates new approaches in lyric theory and methodology.

According to the “Ältestes Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus” philosophy resolves itself into poetics at the end. Hölderlin elaborates this idea in his poetic fragments. The article describes the systematic impact of Hölderlin’s concept of „Wechsel der Töne“ on the act of composing poems. On the example of the seven keywords of an unwritten poem „Ovids Rükkehr nach Rom“, the article focusses on a specific metamorphosis: the one from a pure intellectual and pre-lingual realm into the lingual sphere of a concrete poem. Thereby it becomes clear that the way of thinking (in its pre-lingual sense) is poetic; the process of thinking transforms itself into a genuine poetic progress, and vice versa the structure of a poem turns out to be part of a creative development of thinking. By contrast, the described transformative process elucidates an impact of contemporary poetics, because transformation as a core issue is mostly only referred to linguistic, social, or cultural aspects.

This paper characterizes several ways of transferring knowledge via lyric poetry. It is argued that conveying information via schemata is a prevalent mode of that kind. But there are also others like employing a concise use of language or pointing at other texts using intertextual references. Besides, many poetry books establish some sort of a lyric sequence to further elaborate a certain topic. As information in lyric poetry is not only schematized, but also sketchy, from a critical reception point of view it may also be highlighted that recipients can make use of it as some kind of a template that enables them to gain new insights related to their own living environment. The important role of schemata as well as the other kinds of knowledge transfer specified in this paper are exemplified with reference to the contemporary poetry of ageing and with a special focus on several poems by Harald Hartung. As ageing is a process that becomes more and more important to western societies due to demographic development, the poetry of ageing and of old age in particular may serve as a tool for gaining knowledge and especially knowledge of what-it-is-like regarding that topic. This adds even more authority to the question of how knowledge is transferred via literature and lyric poetry in particular.

The paper gives a survey on the German tradition of didactic poems and nature poems from the 18 th century to the immediate present. The early modern pattern of nature as a peaceful Arcadia, the enlightenment pattern of nature reflecting God in every detail, and the romanticist pattern of nature that is impenetrable but nevertheless a permanent object of longing (“Sehnsucht”) are proved to be models of nature poetry that are the most important reference points up to now. The poems about nature written in the early 21st century refer to these models as well as to their destruction and deconstruction by the modernists and avantgardes of the 20th century. The most convincing poets devoting their attention to nature today play with these traditions with artistic perfection and in an ironic manner at the same time. Often, annotations, essays, and talks on nature are accompanying the lyrical texts. In the present, female writers are the authors of some of the best poems about nature. In several poems, the relationship between love and nature appears under new perspectives. Other important subjects are the landscapes of far-away countries.

Literature and thus also historical poetry want “not only to convey factual truth and to exhort subjective truthfulness, but also to give orientation for the – in whatever respect – correct or appropriate world behavior” (Lamping 2013: 65f.). The question of this paper is to what extent and how the 9/11-poems of Thomas Kling and Durs Grünbein offer a specific counter-historiography beyond the dichotomies of truth and falsehood, fact and fiction, in order to achieve a different level of knowledge. Due to the exhibited self-relatedness Grünbein presents not only in his essayistic pretext but also in his poem „September-Elegien“ mainly a subjective truthfulness rather than any certain orientation-knowledge. Kling’s historiographical-wrapped and complex instrumented poem „Manhattan Mundraum Zwei“ offers over-temporal, metaphysical-existential (counter-)truths and gives orientation beyond media-presented “facts” about 9/11.